Monday, July 04, 2022

4: Chicago



A longevity diet that hacks cell ageing could add years to your life A new diet based on research into the body's ageing process suggests you can increase your life expectancy by up to 20 years by changing what, when and how much you eat ......... I HAVE seen my future and it is full of beans, both literally and metaphorically. As well as upping my bean count, there will be a lot of vegetables, no meat, long periods of hunger and hardly any alcohol. But in return for this dietary discipline, my future will also be significantly longer and sprightlier. I am 52 and, on my current diet, can expect to live another 29 years. But if I change now, I could gain an extra decade and live in good health into my 90s. .

Russia’s army is in a woeful state The fiasco in Ukraine could be a reflection of a bad strategy or a poor fighting force ........ “It’s not a professional army out there,” said Admiral Foggo. “It looks like a bunch of undisciplined rabble.” Since they invaded Ukraine on February 24th, Russian forces have succeeded in capturing just one big city, Kherson, along with the ruins of Mariupol and chunks of Donbas, the eastern industrial region that they partially occupied in 2014 and now hope to conquer in its entirety. That meagre haul has come at the cost of 15,000 dead Russian soldiers, according to a recent British estimate, exceeding in two months the Soviet losses in a decade of war in Afghanistan. The invasion has clearly been a fiasco, but how accurate a reflection of Russia’s military capabilities is it, astonished Western generals wonder? ....... The belief was that Russia would do to Ukraine what America had done to Iraq in 1991: shock and awe it into submission in a swift, decisive campaign. ....... Russian military expenditure, when measured properly—that is, in exchange rates adjusted for purchasing power—almost doubled between 2008 and 2021, rising to over $250bn, about triple the level of Britain or France ........... The charitable interpretation is that the Russian army has been hobbled in Ukraine less by its own deficiencies than by Mr Putin’s delusions. His insistence on plotting the war in secrecy complicated military planning. The fsb, a successor to the kgb, told him that Ukraine was riddled with Russian agents and would quickly fold. That probably spurred the foolish decision to start the war by sending lightly armed paratroopers to seize an airport on the outskirts of Kyiv and lone columns of armour to advance into the city of Kharkiv, causing heavy casualties to elite units. ......... Yet, this coup de main having fizzled, the army then chose to plough into the second largest country in Europe from several directions, splitting 120 or so battalion tactical groups (btgs) into lots of ineffective and isolated forces. Bad tactics then compounded bad strategy: armour, infantry and artillery fought their own disconnected campaigns. Tanks that should have been protected by infantry on foot instead roamed alone, only to be picked off in Ukrainian ambushes. Artillery, the mainstay of the Russian army since tsarist times, though directed with ferocity at cities such as Kharkiv and Mariupol, could not break through Ukrainian lines around Kyiv......... America has been wielding the scalpel nearly continuously since the end of the cold war, in Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and so on. Russia has not fought a war of this magnitude against an organised army since seizing Manchuria from Japan in 1945. ........ things that appeared easy in America’s wars, such as wiping out an enemy’s air defences, are actually quite hard. Russia’s air force is flying several hundred sorties a day, but it is still struggling to track and hit moving targets, and remains heavily reliant on unguided or “dumb” bombs that can be dropped accurately only at low altitudes, exposing its planes to anti-aircraft fire. ........ On April 27th another official said that Russian forces in Donbas appeared unwilling, or unable, to advance in heavy rain. ....... In part, Russia’s woes are down to Ukraine’s heroic resistance, buoyed by a torrent of Western weaponry and intelligence. “But just as much credit for the shattering of Russian illusions lies in a phenomenon long known to military sociologists,” writes Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University, “that

armies, by and large, reflect the qualities of the societies from which they emerge.” Russia’s state, says Mr Cohen, “rests on corruption, lies, lawlessness and coercion”. Each one has been laid bare by Russia’s army in this war.

........... “They put a lot of money into modernisation,” says General Pavel. “But a lot of this money was lost in the process.” Corruption surely helps explain why Russian vehicles were equipped with cheap Chinese tyres, and thus found themselves stuck in the Ukrainian mud. It may also explain why so many Russian units found themselves without encrypted radios and were forced to rely on insecure civilian substitutes or even Ukrainian mobile phone networks. That, in turn, may well have contributed to the war’s toll on Russian generals (Ukraine claims to have killed ten of them), since their communications at the front line would have been easier to intercept. ......... Yet corruption cannot be the whole story. Ukraine is also corrupt, and not much less so than Russia: they sit respectively in 122nd and 136th position on the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International, a pressure group. What really distinguishes the two is fighting spirit. Ukrainian soldiers are battling for the survival of their country. Many Russian ones did not even know they were going to war until they were ordered over the border. ........ Ill-trained and poorly motivated soldiers are a liability in any conflict; they are especially unsuited to the complexities of modern combined-arms warfare, which requires tanks, infantry, artillery and air power to work in synchrony. To attempt such daunting co-ordination in Ukraine with sullen teenagers, press-ganged into service, fed expired rations and equipped with badly maintained vehicles was the height of optimism. ............ Staff training is rigid and outdated, he says, obsessed with the second world war and with little attention paid to newer conflicts. That may explain why doctrine was thrown out of the window. Manoeuvres that seemed easy at Vostok and other stage-managed exercises proved harder to reproduce under fire and far from home. .......... To the extent that Russian officers have studied their military history, they appear to have imbibed the worst lessons of the Afghan, Chechen and Syrian wars. During their occupation of northern Ukraine, Russian soldiers not only drank heavily and looted homes and shops, but murdered large numbers of civilians. Some have been rewarded for it. On April 18th the 64th Motorised Infantry Brigade, accused of massacring civilians in Bucha, was decorated by Mr Putin for its “mass heroism and courage” and accorded the honour of becoming a “Guards” unit. ........... In theory, a war-averting peace deal would reflect the relative power of the two potential belligerents. But the two sides can fail to reach such a bargain because that relative power is not always obvious. ........... That helps explain why Russia so wildly inflated its supposed prowess in the Vostok exercises. And it can work. “I suspect many of us were taken in by Victory Day parades that showed us all of the smart bits of kit,” says the European general. .......... A Russian army that prevails in a war of attrition through sheer firepower and mass would still be a far cry from the nimble, high-tech force advertised over the past decade. More likely is that Russia’s plodding forces will exhaust themselves long before they achieve their objectives in southern and eastern Ukraine, let alone before mounting another attempt on Kyiv. The world’s military planners will be watching not just how far Russia gets in the weeks ahead, but also what that says about its forces’ resilience, adaptability and leadership. Like a knife pushed into old wood, the progress of the campaign will reveal how deep the rot runs.



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